SD Raw Recovery Video Issue

[Philip Shaw]

Good morning. I received a 512GB SanDisk SD card that was being used in a Canon G7x mark ii camera and had thousands of pictures and videos on it. The customer put it in a Nikon D5000 camera and it said it needed to be formatted which she did. She took about 1,100 pictures and then realized she had a problem. I did a raw recovery using R-Studio and got over 6,000 pictures and thousands of videos. The pictures looked fine but none of the videos opened. I ran another raw recovery on the PC3K and had similar results. When I look at the mp4 videos in HexEdit everything at the beginning looks normal and it indicates it was taken with a Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark II. None of the dozens of videos I tried to open work and I sent two to the customer and she couldn't open them either. The SD card is formatted FAT 32 now but she didn't know how it was originally formatted. If it was exFAT before could that be the problem with the larger files? Any suggestions?

Thanks.

[Data Recovery Guru]

The primary issue for the results on the video is fragmentation.

Try Klennet Recovery or Disk Drill. May fair better, but probably not hugely better.

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On Tue, Jun 2, 2026, 8:38 AM Philip Shaw <shawcomput...@gmail.com> wrote:

Good morning. I received a 512GB SanDisk SD card that was being used in a Canon G7x mark ii camera and had thousands of pictures and videos on it. The customer put it in a Nikon D5000 camera and it said it needed to be formatted which she did. She took about 1,100 pictures and then realized she had a problem. I did a raw recovery using R-Studio and got over 6,000 pictures and thousands of videos. The pictures looked fine but none of the videos opened. I ran another raw recovery on the PC3K and had similar results. When I look at the mp4 videos in HexEdit everything at the beginning looks normal and it indicates it was taken with a Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark II. None of the dozens of videos I tried to open work and I sent two to the customer and she couldn't open them either. The SD card is formatted FAT 32 now but she didn't know how it was originally formatted. If it was exFAT before could that be the problem with the larger files? Any suggestions?

Thanks.

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[Desert Data Recovery]

I am confused. So she had 1000s of pictures on the card BEFORE formatting it? Then formatted it and took 1100 more pictures? FAT32 has a max file size of 4GB, so I assume the videos were on a different format.

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[Philip Shaw]

That's why I thought it might have been formatted for exFAT originally. Even 256kb videos won't open, though.

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[Anonymous]

Hi can you a send 2 copy of the file and what is the movie format?

Thanks

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[juanvd...@gmail.com]

I used GPr64 in the past with good success on all the new camera video formats and I see that it is part of Diskdrill now, RStudio and any other carving tool does not work for these video files.

https://www.cleverfiles.com/goprorecovery.html

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[RecuperoDati299]

the point Is not the filesystem 

the point is the fragmentation 

You anyway will do a RAW recovery. At that point the filesystem won't matter anymore 

One guy out there worked on a software for enhanced raw recovery for photo and videos that would fix the fragmentation 

Need to check on LinkedIn , though he is the developer of ZAR

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Il giorno 2 giugno 2026, alle ore 14:38, Philip Shaw <datarecovery...@googlegroups.com> ha scritto:

Good morning. I received a 512GB SanDisk SD card that was being used in a Canon G7x mark ii camera and had thousands of pictures and videos on it. The customer put it in a Nikon D5000 camera and it said it needed to be formatted which she did. She took about 1,100 pictures and then realized she had a problem. I did a raw recovery using R-Studio and got over 6,000 pictures and thousands of videos. The pictures looked fine but none of the videos opened. I ran another raw recovery on the PC3K and had similar results. When I look at the mp4 videos in HexEdit everything at the beginning looks normal and it indicates it was taken with a Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark II. None of the dozens of videos I tried to open work and I sent two to the customer and she couldn't open them either. The SD card is formatted FAT 32 now but she didn't know how it was originally formatted. If it was exFAT before could that be the problem with the larger files? Any suggestions?

Thanks.

--

[Philip Shaw]

Here are two small files.

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[DiskTuna]

Looking at the start of the file is all fine and dandy, and it does say something but hardly everything. It's a good quick first check, that's all, It's easy enough to jump the chain of boxes and see if it actually references the mdat box.

RAW recovery in R-Studio assumes files are contiguous.

Try Klennet Carver. Use at Windows PC with plenty cores + 2 GB per core.

[DiskTuna]

Both files lack mdat box.

[Philip Shaw]

Klennet is quite expensive and the demo version won't let me verify whether the files are functional. Do you think it is worth it?

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[juan van der meulen]

I had 99% success with GPR64 now part of Diskdrill under video recovery option, you need to select camera recovery and it paid it self of with one job.

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[Abdur Rahim Sopon]

can you upload card image full or 10gb?

Best Regards

Abdur rahim sopon

Data Recovery expert

Founder of Data Recovery BD™

WP/call:+8801912881685

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[Philip Shaw]

At Juan's suggestion I tried Disk Drill. It cost about $126 with a discount and worked great. It found about 2.5 times the amount of pictures that the PC3K and R-Studio found and 828 videos (all of which seem to work fine). And it 

will much more than pay for itself on this job. If you don't have Disk Drill it might be a good time to buy it.

Thank you for your help on this.

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[pbzcbf...@gmail.com]

Some time ago, in a Reddit thread, Clever Files was giving free copies of Disk Drill to those involved in the data recovery business.

[juan van der meulen]

This is the original website with a lot of technical detail how the videos files are made out of. Cheers 

https://t.goprorecovery.co.uk/index.html

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[pbzcbf...@gmail.com]

The original price was $34 for the forensic version. Now it comes bundled with Disk Drill crap. :-(

[Abdur Rahim Sopon]

Hi everyone,

These days, many data recovery software options are capable of recovering fragmented footage successfully.

Diskdrill, CNW, Gopro recovery(GPR), wandershare, easeus data recovery etc.

Only USF, R-Studio and other most popular old software still not able to restore working footage. 

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[pbzcbf...@gmail.com]

I asked the author of DMDE if he would consider adding support for GoPro files. He said that it would require a lot of research and coding effort, and he believed there would be very little gain for him. Presumably these fragmented video/photo file formats constitute a relatively small, niche section of the market. From my perspective, this is the wrong attitude. Surely, the author of UFS Explorer, the gold standard, should consider supporting these file types. I don't understand it.

[pbzcbf...@gmail.com]

This site has a technical breakdown:

https://community.gopro.com/s/article/GoPro-Camera-File-Naming-Convention?language=en_US

As I understand it, a large file consists of two or more 4GB fragments. The recovery tool locates these fragments and assembles them into a single file. Is that something that could be done with a Python script, for example? Does the tool locate these fragments by examining some metadata in each file, assuming the file system metadata has been destroyed?

On Saturday, June 6, 2026 at 5:14:42 AM UTC+10 juanvd...@gmail.com wrote:

[Alandata Recovery]

As I understand it...

Video is encoded in steam s of data that are interleaved into a composited file. 

So it's

Video data

Audio

Video

Audio

....

These chunks are dynamically compressed so their size varies. 

They can also store thumbnails as jpegs in the stream. 

With go pro there is an extra small video stream that is there to allow quick playback through the tiny screen.

Security DVR recorder do the same. Blend multiple camera feeds into a single 'video'. This has to be sorted out for playback and is handled by the codec.

So... What looks like a 'file' is more like a braid

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[pbzcbf...@gmail.com]

You're talking about the internal structure of the file. I'm referring to the fact that the file is divided into 4GB parts, presumably to circumvent the limitations of FAT32. These 4GB parts then need to be assembled into a single file. 

For example, a playable 8GB video might consist of two 4GB files. Normal data recovery software, which isn't GoPro-aware, would recover those two separate 4GB files, but GPR64 would recover the 8GB video. Is that how it works? If so, then how does GPR64 identify the component parts if the file names have been destroyed and the software needs to resort to file carving?